Leslie Spitz-Edson's Blog, page 5

Some questions the game reveals

In researching Seeking the Center, I listened to a lot of post-game interviews with hockey players. I became interested in the very scripted language that they use to describe what happens in the games - including a whole category of phrases emphasizing their deep engagement - and uneasy relationship - with luck and fate.

When a player is able to score or make a good play, she might say, "I got a good bounce." This might be nothing more than the typical hockey-player modesty. On the other hand, it might be a kind of superstitious acknowledgement of fate's role in her success.  Because above all, we want to stay on fate's good side.

If a player had some chances to score but just fell short of getting that puck into the net, he might shrug it off, rather fatalistically, by saying, "They just weren't going in for me today." Because we wouldn't want to tempt fate to make it even harder for us the next time, would we?

There's also the commonly expressed notion that "we have to make our own luck" - which points to an interesting relationship with that important but elusive commodity. It would seem to be a paradox: Isn't it in the very definition of luck that it's something outside of our control? Hmm.  Making one's own luck seems related to the oft-repeated sentiment, usually shared in the case of a less-skilled, grinder-type player who scores what is, for her, a rare goal: "She works so hard, it's good to see her get rewarded." I.e., she works so hard that fate itself was ultimately forced to yield to her determination. When you really think about it, that's some serious shit!

Fate and luck are central to our concerns as humans. We confront them constantly, but in everyday life the stakes tend to be higher, our roles less certain and causation more difficult to determine. I wonder whether playing a game like hockey allows us to engage with fate in a way that is easier to grasp, that might seem to be less bafflingly random, where the illusion of some measure of control is stronger, and where, therefore, the experience is more gratifying, more ennobling to us lowly, insignificant humans.

Just as hockey is a "game of inches," so is life, in a way, a series of situations in which, if only something had happened slightly differently, at a slightly different time, the outcome would have been vastly different. And it's comforting to think that things will even out over time. For example, remember that goal that Williams scored - the one that was waved off because the puck slipped over the line a split second after the clock hit 0:00? He got it back when Vrana's shot glanced off him and into the net. Right?

Cosmic payback? Making his own luck? Or the law of averages? These are some of the questions the game reveals.

 

 

 

 

 

Tuning in to my characters

I often feel that my characters are already there, even before I begin writing. My job is to tune in to them, as if I'm fiddling with a radio dial to get a clear signal. Like a radio,  I become a conduit through which my characters' voices travel from there to here.

Occasionally a scene seems to be just waiting for me to catch it. It coalesces when I first wake up in the morning, or maybe in the middle of the night, and I scramble to comprehend it and scribble it down before it vanishes. Then, as time goes on, I have to figure out where it belongs in the story. Sometimes that's a puzzle.

When I was writing Seeking the Center, one of the last scenes in the story came to me very early on, and I thought I had the ending all figured out. But as I continued writing, I began to realize that I was wrong, and things ended up very differently than I had initially thought they would.

The scene itself remained, though, as it still does in the final version - the core of it almost exactly as I first wrote it down. What no longer made sense for one character, made perfect sense for another. 

I have wondered what happened in the interim. Did my characters purposefully defy my expectations? Was I - perhaps subconsciously - trying to use them to further some hidden agenda of my own, and they rebelled? Or did I just not know them as well as I thought I did?

Maybe it was just a faulty radio.

Jack Falla and "A Death in Montreal"

One of my favorite writers on hockey is Jack Falla, a Massachusetts native who covered the NHL for Sports Illustrated in the 1980s and taught sports journalism at Boston University. Sadly, he passed away in 2008 at the all-too-young age of 64, but I almost feel that I've had the the opportunity to know him through his essay collections Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds and Open Ice: Reflections and Confessions of a Hockey Lifer.

Falla's short essays make the sport personal. They describe the many ways that hockey enriched, inspired and even, in certain ways, created him as a person.

One of my favorites is "A Death in Montreal," the first essay in Open Ice. Here, the death of hockey great Maurice "Rocket" Richard in 2000 unexpectedly connects Falla to a lost part of his childhood, allowing him to grieve, finally, for his mother, who had died forty-five years earlier, when Falla was eleven years old.

It's a beautifully constructed essay that somehow draws together, in twenty-seven simply but elegantly written pages, many seemingly disparate worlds. There's the world of Falla's childhood in 1950s Massachusetts: "I don't know why I wasn't told the truth [about my mother's ovarian cancer]. Maybe I wasn't supposed to know about ovaries." There's Maurice Richard: "more than a seething and driven scoring machine. He was the fleur-de-lis made flesh, a human flag for the simmering resentments of French Canadians." And then there's Falla's maternal grandmother schooling his Boston-bred, hockey-fan father: "It's Mohr-riss Ri-sharr, Nana said. I know. I'm French."

In the end, Falla's subtle prose links his belated tears of mourning on a Vermont interstate to Nana's exploding bottles of root beer some forty years earlier, illuminating the layered and entwined webs of meaning that our minds create out of elements widely scattered in time, place and context.

Slumping

Ugh, my team is slumping. Even with a couple of the best scorers in the league, they've lost three games in a row. Which shouldn't be so bad, because like everyone, they know a slump is just a slump (hence the name) and that it will end.

But the problem with slumping - the very thing that makes it a slump rather than just a lost game or two - is that you don't feel like it will end. When you're slumping you've forgotten how quickly the weather can change. You've forgotten to have faith that it will. You're just on this endless run of thinking and over-thinking and, worst of all, trying not to over-think.

It probably doesn't help that every question a reporter asks you is about the slump. You can't get away from it. And although players, coaches, reporters and fans alike offer every possible cliché, unlike the situation with the weather, no one knows what forces will ultimately be responsible for the end of a slump.

No one knows.

Hockey for everyone!

Do I play hockey? Not yet. I'm still learning how to skate. Trust me, this is difficult enough.

I love my skating lessons, though, and I'm pretty sure my teacher is the best teacher ever, even though what she calls my "process of self-discovery" often seems like nothing more than the discovery of my total inability to process that crazy move she just showed me!

Seriously, though, I could start taking some learn-to-play classes anytime now. You don't need to be a great skater to play in a novice league. What you do need is time and money. Your time - those slivers of the day that aren't already spoken for - needs to align with the time the classes are held and the games are played (often late at night for adults). Your money must be plentiful enough so that you can buy the gear (you need full gear even to just learn to play - those pucks are hard!) and to pay for the classes and, eventually, to pay league fees or dues.

Still, I could learn to play if I made it a priority. Unfortunately, though, a lot of people can't. Especially in places where playing hockey depends on artificial ice - which, thanks to global climate change, is pretty much everywhere these days - hockey is a very expensive game.

Luckily, there are forces in the sport that are working for more inclusivity, trying to "grow the game," as they say, by giving away time and money (i.e., volunteering and donating equipment and ice time) to programs that teach kids who otherwise wouldn't even have the chance to try hockey.

For example, check out this photo montage of one such program in Washington, DC, on a day when NHL players Donald Brashear, Wayne Simmonds and Willie O'Ree came to work with the kids. It must have been seriously inspiring for those young people!

You can't fall in love with the game unless you have the chance to try it. And the game won't thrive without the influx of thousands of young people, inspired to devote countless hours of skating and sweat to playing this awesome game!

P.S. Because ice is so expensive, and because government funding for recreational facilities is often hard to come by, we turn to creative solutions. But they aren't always perfect. Here's an interesting update on the situation at Ft. Dupont, the rink pictured in the photo montage noted above. 

On (bad) language

We were finalizing the manuscript of Seeking when my editor suddenly balked at my use of a certain four-letter word beginning with the letter "c." It had been there for months, if not years, so I was a little taken aback. And yes, it's offensive (although I understand that in Australia it's sometimes used as a term of endearment) but uttered by a 20-some-odd year-old male hockey player as a deliberately ugly way to get under an opponent's skin, it hardly seemed over the top.

In the end, my editor agreed with me, but she did ask me to tone down some of the other language in the story, and I, ever trying to make it my policy not to be defensive, tried to be open to the suggestion.

I had figured that the "f-word" would be the most concerning to her, but she pinpointed the use of "goddamn" as most troublesome. And when I actually counted and discovered that there were no fewer than 65 (!) instances of this word in the novel, I couldn't disagree, at least on the grounds of sheer overuse.

But how to proceed? I started by categorizing them. Some of the "goddamns" were there for emphasis or rhythm. These tended to be hardest to remove or replace, because rhythm is important to me, and once I get a certain rhythm in my head, it's difficult to change. Other "goddamns" were used as adjectives or adverbs. When I looked more closely at these, I felt that some were more justified than others. There were some cases in which, if the offending word was removed or replaced, the writing would be improved. But there were also cases where I felt it wouldn't be.

Sometimes, using "goddamn" as a modifier seemed like an excuse to not think of a more specific word. For example, this phrase:

...number three, for being such a goddamn good hockey player that he'd had to move far, far away;

is actually more lively and more descriptive this way:

...number three, for being such a ridiculously good hockey player that he'd had to move far, far away.

And it's easy to imagine Agnes thinking exactly that. On the other hand, in this case --

Is that really all she wanted? To go to that goddamn party?

-- it's difficult to think of a replacement adjective that would express everything that the "goddamn" expresses. That silly party? That lousy party? That overrated party? That overhyped party? That occasion that is, at the root of it, just a bunch of guys standing around eating and drinking together because they're lonely and single and have nothing better to do? The point is, there are a lot of things on Owen's mind at this moment in the story, and I think it's better to let the reader use the unspecific "goddamn" as an opportunity to conjure those things, than for me to pin it down, reducing it to just one idea. Also, it's hard to imagine Owen's thoughts containing any of those replacement adjectives.

In the end, I removed more than a third of the "goddamns" -- although my editor ended up questioning some of the removals, which led us to reinsert some of them. I also largely rewrote one of the book's scenes using my new criteria. All in all, I think that reconsidering the language improved the storytelling, and I learned some things from doing it. 

What do you think? Are there too many "goddamns" and the like in Seeking the Center? I'd be curious to know!

 

The hardest part of writing

At a book signing, someone asked me "what was the hardest part of writing this book?" I didn't have a great answer at the time, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

The hardest thing might simply be having faith. Faith that, if you devote a good chunk of time, energy, and thought, every day, for many, many days, you will eventually end up with something.

It's relatively easy to keep the faith when things are going well, when you're in the flow of your work, when you're feeling confident. It's harder when you hit a rough spot. In that regard, writing is no different than anything else.

It's hard to believe in yourself. And it's hard to be selfish enough to keep at it. I always have doubts - especially when I'm sacrificing financially and postponing things that need doing around the house to spend my time writing. That's why I'm so grateful to have family who have been unfailingly supportive, and friends who say, without a hint of skepticism, "wow, you're writing a novel? That's great!"

A visit with some awesome sixth graders

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit with some sixth graders who were, in the words of their teachers, beginning a unit in which they would "look at the past through the lenses of both historical fiction and factual information." They asked me to speak with them briefly about how I used research in writing Seeking the Center.

Seeking the Center takes place in the 1990s, so it's not a deeply historical novel. But because my characters are very much affected by past events, I did quite a bit of research on the history of their region.

The students were bright and engaged and asked great questions. I thoroughly enjoyed being with them and I hope they got a sense of how much fun it is to let your natural interest and curiosity lead you, from one source to another, into a whole new (or old) time and place!

This isn't normal, people

I interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast for this special message.

This isn't normal, people. In this country, the election of a person with a vocal disregard for democratic values, and even for human values, is unprecedented, destructive, and frightening.

This campaign and election have proven, if we needed proof, that bigoted, horrific attitudes do exist in our country. We can't pretend that they don't.

Let's respond by NOT being afraid and NOT remaining silent when we witness injustice, bigotry and cruelty.

Don't let the forces of evil divide us. Let's stay together.

Depends on who's here

I wrote earlier that a sport can have different meanings for different people. But it can take on different meanings for a single individual, too. In Seeking the Center, Agnes, who prides herself on never playing hockey "just for fun", discovers different facets of the game she thought she knew. In some ways her journey parallels my own research.

Hockey in one form or another has been around a long time. Just how long, no one really knows. The rules of the modern game started to solidify during the late nineteenth century as, like baseball, hockey became part of a trend toward standardization that seems to have been inherent in modernization.

Historically, organized sports including (at times) hockey have been promoted as a way to keep young men "out of trouble" when they weren't working - a way to keep them in order and physically fit. It has often been described in decidedly nationalist and capitalist terms.: a quasi-militarist marshaling of masculine energy in the service of the state and the status quo.

The upside is fitness, teamwork, leadership skills. The downside is, among other things, an assimilationist philosophy that subordinates the individual to the collective.

Prior to the standardization of sport, there was, in theory anyhow, more opportunity for all sorts of people to play. And, play could happen anywhere - not just in "approved" spaces of standard size and shape. Teams could expand and contract to fit the number of willing participants, and the only rules regarding the age or gender of the player were set by the players themselves. Even the rules of play could be adapted to different situations.

It isn't so much that standardization is inherently bad. The modern, professional game of hockey is thrilling and the skills that the players develop through their rigorous training and drills are beautiful to behold. It's just that, we sometimes forget that this particular incarnation of the game isn't necessarily the only one, the natural one, or the best one for everyone.

In Seeking the Center, Agnes's relationship with hockey deepens. As the story progresses she can see its downsides more clearly, but she also finds new reasons to love it. She realizes that playing hockey at the highest technical level isn't the only way to take the game seriously. Hockey is big enough to embrace everyone and flexible enough to serve multiple purposes. In the words of her linemate, Rosemary, "it's different every time. Depends on who's here."